دو روز دیگر یعنی سوم و چهارم اگوست کنفرانس دو سالانه مطالعات ایرانی در دانشگاه لندن برگزار می شود. در این کنفرانس بزرگ من هم مقاله ای با عنوان چالش ها و تغییرات در فرهنگ دانشگاهی ایران ارائه می کنم. خلاصه این مقاله که برای ۲۰ دقیقه سخنرانی آماده ام را در اینجا می گذارم. بسیار ممنون می شوم تا نظرات خودتان را درباره آن برایم بنویسید. من روندهای تغییر در دانشگاه ها و آموزش عالی را ذکر کرده و بطور خاص با تکیه بر تجربه تدریس در کلاس های انسان شناسی و مطالعات فرهنگی که اخیرا داشتم به توصیف پدیده زنانه شدن علوم انسانی به مثابه یکی از تغییرات جاری در علوم انسانی پرداخته ام. امکان بررسی تمام روندها در مدت ۲۰ دقیقه سخنرانی ام وجود ندارد، دوست داشتم تمام روندهای تغییر فهرست شده را توضیح می دام. ممنون می شوم تا نظرات تان را برایم قبل از کنفرانس ارائه نمایید.

 

1- Introduction

 

This paper is an ethnographic account of my observations and experiences of teaching anthropology and cultural studies in Iranian universities[1]. It aims to ethnographically demonstrate the most recent changes and challenges in Iranian academic culture focusing on one particular phenomenon, namely the femininisation of humanities (art, philosophy, literature and theology) and social sciences (sociology, anthropology, psychology, economy, political sciences and law).

 

To begin with, let us to define my application and definition of three key concepts, namely academic culture, ethnography, and femininisation. Academic culture means the university way of living, teaching, learning and studying. From an anthropological perspective, university is not just an amalgam of buildings, libraries, lecture theatres and individuals. Rather, it consists of symbols, rules, norms, meanings, values and ideas. Each university has its own rituals, heroes, myths and ideologies. It is a community and tribe with its specific symbols and boundaries or symbolic boundaries that makes it different from other communities. The main function of academic culture is to provide a context and ground for university system to do its tasks such as teaching, training, studying, researching and academically socializing students.

 

Meanwhile, by ethnography I mean a thick description of cultural context and perceptions of experiences and practices of people and or organizations studied. Ethnography has become one of the major methods of researching educational settings. Its key strength is its emphasis on understanding the perceptions and cultures of the people and organizations studied. Without understanding the cultural context and the perceptions and culture of universities, one would not be able to profoundly understand higher education in today’s time.

 

Also, by femininisation I mean the process of gradual domination and development of women interests, concerns, norms, values and beliefs in the academic culture of disciplines of humanities and social sciences and their faculties and classrooms. I should emphasis that in this paper I am not arguing that the epistemological, metrological and theoretical frames and orientations of the disciplines studied are becoming feminine and or a feminist approach is dominating them, though it maybe happen in the future.

 

 

 

 

Changing the Iranian Cultural Context of Universities

Now let us to briefly explain the problem that I am going to focus on, namely the changes and challenges that Iranian humanities and social sciences have been experiencing and confronting in recent years.

 

With the establishment of Dar-al-Fonoon in 1851, Amir Kabir, the wise Minister of Qajarids, sowed the seeds of Iranian modern higher education. However, Iranian modern higher education was not fully formed and born till 1934 when Reza Shah established The University of Tehran. Since that time till now Iranian higher education has been constantly and exceedingly developing and expanding. By 1979, the onset of the Islamic Revolution, Iranian higher education system considerably expanded so that it included up to 26 universities, 87 colleges, 228 higher education institutions and 180,000 students. Despite the vast expansion and development that happened to Iranian higher education system, the system was not able to meet the public demands for higher education. Therefore, since the Islamic Revolution, again Iranian higher education system began to dramatically expand and develop to the point that by 2004 there were 105 public (state) universities, 16 independent schools, 9 higher education centres, 135 institutes, in addition to 150 branches of the Islamic Azad University, and 39 non-profit institutes.

 

The above account shows a general view of the formation and expansion of the universities in Iran. One may ask how and why Iranian higher education expanded? And what have been the impacts and consequences of this expansion on Iranian understanding of university and higher education? It is not difficult to understand why universities developed and expanded in the modern world. The institution of university is part of all modern societies including Iran. It has been a part of modern nation-state bureaucratic apparatus to meet the state needs for training skilled manpower, meeting political imperatives, and the social needs for modernization of the society in general. Alongside these administrative and state functions, the institution of university has had many other social, political and cultural functions and impacts in both developed and developing countries.

 

However, with changing the political and cultural contexts of societies over the last decades the function and nature of university have considerably changed. Since the 1960’s, due to the new structural changes in society, such as demographic changes, emergence of information technologies, changes in modes of knowledge production, emergence of knowledge based society, post modernism, post-industrial society, and the expansion of literacy, a higher education revolution has taken place in most countries of the world including Iran. This revolution included and influenced all aspects of higher education systems and universities, including the management, functions, demographic structures, missions, teaching and training programmes and conventions.

 

In this revolution many new developments and structural changes such as massification, internationalisation, digitalisation, privatisation, democratisation, and commercialisation have been formed and established. Whereas some scholars argue that universities are in ruin, others are more optimistic and believe that the developments and processes created a new modern university, which is more customer and student- oriented than the elite one. The new university belongs to all people, not just the minority of elite and high-class groups. Due to these changing processes it seems that the production of knowledge is no longer the main mission of universities, and people do not come to university just to become an educated elite.

 

Regarding these facts, almost all scholars agree that traditional elitist and modern university has changed and a new massified and post-modern university has emerged. University has become a cultural site to practice and carry out many cultural activities to form and represent cultural identities such as ethnic, gender, and social and political identities.

 

All the processes mentioned above are impacting Iranian university significantly. Since the 1980’s Iranian universities have been rapidly changing in different way. The major trends of change that I have observed and experienced can be classified as follows:

 

Changing the demographic structure of the universities as more students register.
Changing the gender structure as more female students enter the universities.
· Changing the administrative structure as demands increase for democratisation and participation of the staff in the university management system.

· Changing the university teaching methods as the application of educational technologies and the number of postgraduate students increases.

· Changing the social structure of the universities as more students with different cultural backgrounds and social status –rural, urban, tribal groups - come to the universities.

· Changing the syllabus and teaching programme as the universities offer more new courses.

· Changing the cultural atmosphere of the universities towards secularism and modernity as more students and staff follow and prefer their own individual life styles, thoughts and ideals rather than following government oriented styles and rules.

· Changing the political atmosphere of the universities towards depoliticisation, secularism and more critical and unsatisfied views of the state.

· Changing the student culture and life towards a more secular, modern and anti-traditional culture.

· Changing the economic structure of the universities along with increasing the private and non-governmental financial recourses of the universities.

· Changing the learning culture as more electronic and digital recourses and tools become available in the universities.

 

 

In addition to those global processes, there are sets of local processes that make Iranian university more complex to understand. For instances, Iranian university has never had autonomy and it has always been severely politicised. All political regimes in Iran saw university as an ideological instrument to produce political knowledge to justify their aims and existence, and to politically socialise new young generation according to their purposes. However, in the mean time, the university has been a site of cultural and political resistance against the governments and state hegemony. As a lecturer of anthropology and an ethnographer in an Iranian university I can see how the concept of university has changed and the new university has emerged in Iran. Here I shall explain the state of the humanities and social sciences focusing on just some most recent challenges. Due to the lack of time and space it is not possible to explain all the above changing trends.

 

 

Challenging Humanities

Due to the above mentioned massive bureaucratic expansion and development of Iranian higher education in recent decades, the humanities and social sciences are extraordinarily expanded throughout the country, so that almost all of Iranian universities – except medical and engineering universities - offer some courses of humanities and social sciences.

 

Paradoxically, despite this development and expansion, the humanities and social sciences have been confronting with two challenges in recent years. First, a political challenge posed by the Islamic Revolution discourse. The second one is a social challenge caused by a gender shift in the disciplines. The political challenge is almost known to the community of Iranian studies scholars, and well discussed by several authors. But the second challenge is a new phenomenon and has not been discussed. However, both challenges are politically interrelated. Here I shall briefly explain the political challenge, and then I shall focus on the gender challenge in more detail.

 

 

1- The political challenge

Universities are part of the modern world that contributed to modernizing and changing socio-cultural structure of humanities societies in general. The modern institution of higher education and university has been expanding all over the world since the nineteenth century as part of the global modernisation processes. The major missions of the modern university institution have been expanding, promoting and enhancing modernity and its processes such as rationalisation, democratisation, liberalisation, humanisation and modernisation. All of these processes are conceived as contrary to the revolutionary and political discourse Islam, (especially that of the fundamentalist rather than the reformist one), established by the Islamic Revolution.

 

Since the advent of the Islamic revolution of 1979 the humanities and social sciences have always been a very challenging and problematic phenomenon. Here has been a sever argument that modern humanities and social sciences are western, secular, nationalistic, humanistic, modernist and anti-religion in nature.

The state approaches the humanities ties from an independency theory and sees the discipline as means of cultural imperialism and a kind of scientific exploitation Therefore, an Islamic and revolutionary humanities and social sciences need to be replacing these disciplines; otherwise, the disciplines might be extremely restricted and controlled.

 

In recent years and after the presidential election of 2005, which the fundamentalist and the right wing groups came to power, the humanities and social sciences have been again facing with more challenges and the political pressure on the disciplines has been enhancing. The fundamentalist right wing groups see the humanities and social sciences as western cultural means to secularize and westernize Iranian youth students and the universities. Their confrontation with these disciplines is not just an epistemological and theoretical challenge. Rather, it is a practical one and they have difficulties with what the staff and students are experiencing in the universities. From their view, the cultural atmosphere of the universities, and in particular in the humanities and social science faculties, is not Islamic and need to be changed and islamised. Therefore, they are unsatisfied with what the students and the staff faculty members are experiencing and practicing in the classrooms and university campuses.

 

 

2 - The gender challenge

Each of the above trends of change brings about a set of cultural and educational shifts in universities around the world and in Iranian universities too. Here it is not possible, due to lack of time and space, to discuss all the trends and their impacts in detail. However, here I shall try to provide a more detailed ethnographic account of the situation focusing on one special change, which is the femininisation of humanities and social sciences.

 

 

Femininisation of an anthropology classroom

 

In the second semester of 2005-6 I ran a cultural anthropology course to two classes for graduate students of Allameh Tabatabai University. I taught two different courses of cultural studies to postgraduate students too. In the anthropology course I had the total of 34 graduate students of which 28 of them were female and the rest were male gradate students. Also, more than half of the 12 postgraduate students of the cultural studies course were female. Comparing this figure with two decades ago shows a great change in the demographic gender structure of Iranian university. When I first entered to the university in 1984, less than 20 percent of students were female students, and in some of the courses and classes there were no female at all. Statistical figures show that more than 80 percentages of all Iranian students in humanities and social sciences are females. This figure is more evident in Allameh Tabatabai University as the largest Iranian humanities university. This university does not offer none-humanities courses. Therefore, the female students utterly predominate its demographic structure.

 

Here I am not going to examine the roots and causes of domination of female students in Iranian universities. Rather, my aim is to discuss the cultural and educational impacts and influences of this gender shift in Iranian universities and the academic culture. This gender shift is bringing about changes in many aspects of university teaching and training experience and practices. As I already said I call this phenomenon femininisation of humanities and social sciences.

 

Although Iranian society is a patrimonial and male dominant orientation, its universities are changing and it gradually would bring changes to the society. The first impact of this femininisation is changing in the classroom atmosphere. In my course, the female students looked at the classroom as a place and platform for presenting themselves as female, and to show their power to the male students or to the society in general. The females utterly did speak about their life, personal experiences and autobiography since they found the classroom quite feminine. For the females the classroom was a social space to present and construct their own opinion about life, politics and society and sometime to relieve their pains and panics in personal level.

 

The second impact was the femininisation of the classroom agendas. We lecturers choose the agendas for discussion in the classrooms. Particularly, we anthropologists have to use case studies and examples to concretely demonstrate our arguments and discussions. We cannot make decision on this issue regardless of our students’ needs and concerns if we want to attract their full attention and participation in the discussion. Since anthropology is about culture, my students expected me to discuss on their understanding and experiencing of the present and existing culture or cultural matters. They eagerly wanted to discuss everyday life issues and problems. For them anthropology would be interesting just when it focuses on the problematic aspects of contemporary culture, and not the past or ancient cultures.

 

Now I provide a list of some of the discussions that I had in the anthropology and cultural studies courses. I should mention that all of my discussions in the anthropology course are published in my weblog called Notes of an Ethnographer (http://nfazeli.blogfa.com) My discussions listed in the following utterly show how the courses was femininised.

 

· Marriage and divorce in today’s Iran.

· Cultural foundations and roots of gender inequality

· Women drug addiction and smoking

· Iranian men’s attitude and behaviour towards women.

· Upbringing children

· House works

· Fashion

· Social aspects of body

· Superstitions

· Women political and social participation

· Women academic achievements

· Women social and economic rights

· Consumptions and shopping

· Feminism

· Leisure and popular culture

· Islam and gender

 

 

The third impact of femininisation of the humanities and social sciences is entering more talented female students with science or mathematic diploma into the humanities and social science courses. 16 out of 28 my female students had diploma in science and or mathematics. This issue is educationally and culturally very significant. Conventionally, Iranian talented and higher social class students do not study humanities in higher school. Therefore, most of the secondary school students of humanities are educationally weaker and less talented individuals. The talented students are not generally inclined to study humanities and social sciences in university except when they failed to study medical or engineering disciplines.

 

However, in recent years the situation has been gradually changed. Since there are not enough job opportunities for female graduates of engineering and medical disciplines, some of the females choose to study humanities and social sciences. Also, my experience and dialogues with my talented and social activist students show that some of the Iranian young female students are aware of the intellectual and cultural power of humanities and social sciences. So, they choose humanities and social sciences to express their opinion and change the society to their own ideals.

 

 

Also, I as a male and relatively young lecturer, needed to learn how to communicate with female dominant classrooms. There are prevailing many stereotyping beliefs about intellectual and cognitive differences between male and female students among most lecturers of my university. One of them is that female students are less creative and their analytical and abstract ability are weaker than the male students. And it is also common among the lecturers that female students obey the lecturer’s advises and coursework better than the male students.

 

Furthermore, there are some cultural restrictions for opposite sex relationship and communication in Iranian society and culture. In the universities both students and lecturers have to consider these restrictions. This issue is more intense and serious for young lecturers such as me. The point is due to femininisation of the cultural atmosphere of the faculty and classrooms; it has become more comfortable for both female students and male lecturers to communicate and understand each other. However, one can still observe that most lecturers’ attitude towards female students is negative and they still believe in sex differences in intellectual capacity. They think the female students work harder and do their assignments on time, but their writings are less creative and rich.

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[1] Since 1984 first I have been studying and then teaching in Iranian universities. I got my bachelor and master degrees from Tabriz University in 1986, and I got my master in anthropology from Tehran University in 1991. I taught anthropology and social science courses from 1991 up to 1999. Then in 1999, to study for a PhD in anthropology I went to SOAS (London University). In 2005, upon getting my PhD, I returned to Iran and started to teach anthropology and cultural studies courses. Iranian academic culture has persistently and hastily been changing within the period of 1985 up to now (2006), so that there is very little left unaffected.

 

 

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